[chimerax-users] Version 1.4 for CentOS 7?

[Greg Couch]

I'm adding this for completeness, but this is not a practical solution:

There is a way of getting ChimeraX 1.4 to run on CentOS 7 that we do NOT 
support.  There are two steps required: (1) you have to update the 
kernel to a newer version.  That can be done with the elrepo-kernel 
repository.  And (2) you need a newer versions of various system 
libraries.  That can be done with by using a CentOS/RHEL 8 or 9 
singularity container that has the same graphics driver as the CentOS 7 
system and has the corresponding ChimeraX rpm installed.

So, unless it is your personal computer, that you could update to 
CentOS/RHEL 8 or 9 anyway, it is extremely unlikely that the system 
administrators will be willing to change to an unsupported kernel.  But 
just in case, an example singularity definition file is attached.  I was 
testing in a virtual machine using VMware Workstation, which is why the 
VMware graphics driver is installed.  Once you have the singularity 
container, I'd recommend making a chimerax alias.  For example:

     alias chimerax="singularity run /PATH/chimerax.el8.sil"

So there you have it.  It is technically possible,  And don't forgot to 
regularly regenerate the singularity container to pick up security fixes.

     -- Greg

On 6/16/2022 4:32 AM, Ricardo Righetto via ChimeraX-users wrote:
> Dear Tristan, dear Tom,
>
> Thank you very much for the answers, I can totally understand the 
> situation. Hopefully we can upgrade the distro on our cluster soon, 
> until then we stick to 1.3 there.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> --
> Ricardo Diogo Righetto
>
>
> Em qua., 15 de jun. de 2022 às 18:53, Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net> 
> escreveu:
>
>     Tristan is right. ChimeraX is not available for CentOS 7 or Ubuntu
>     16 or 18 because the Qt 6 window toolkit does not support those
>     old Linux operating systems and ChimeraX 1.4 uses Qt 6.  So
>     ChimeraX 1.3 is the last release that can be used with those
>     operating systems.
>
>     Greg Couch on the ChimeraX developer team tried compiling Qt 6 for
>     CentOS 7, and tried making a Docker image, a Singularity image,
>     and a Flatpak.  None of these worked.  Because the Qt window
>     toolkit is a much bigger package than the entire ChimeraX project
>     we don't have the programmers to make Qt work on old Linux
>     versions if the Qt Company chooses not to support old Linux.
>
>     Tom
>
>
>>     On Jun 15, 2022, at 8:22 AM, Tristan Croll via ChimeraX-users
>>     <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     Sadly, this is going to become a theme for virtually all
>>     scientific packages using (Py)Qt for their GUI. The Qt company
>>     have decided to stop supporting the free version of Qt5, pushing
>>     all developers other than those who can afford the license fees
>>     on to Qt6 (which does not run in CentOS 7). It's a real pain, but
>>     that's just the way things are.
>>
>>     -- Tristan
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>     *From:*ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users-bounces at cgl.ucsf.edu> on
>>     behalf of Ricardo Righetto via ChimeraX-users
>>     <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu>
>>     *Sent:*15 June 2022 15:58
>>     *To:*chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu>
>>     *Subject:*[chimerax-users] Version 1.4 for CentOS 7?
>>     Hi,
>>
>>     First, apologies if this has already been announced elsewhere.
>>     I see on the download webpage that there is no production release
>>     for CentOS 7 and the latest daily release for this platform was
>>     built on 2022-05-06. Any chance we could get a production release
>>     of 1.4 and/or a newer daily build for CentOS 7?
>>
>>     Thank you very much!
>>
>>     Best wishes,
>>
>>     --
>>     Ricardo Diogo Righetto
>>     _______________________________________________
>>     ChimeraX-users mailing list
>>     ChimeraX-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
>>     Manage subscription:
>>     https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/mailman/listinfo/chimerax-users
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ChimeraX-users mailing list
> ChimeraX-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
> Manage subscription:
> https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/mailman/listinfo/chimerax-users
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimerax-users/attachments/20220616/daf0f435/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
Bootstrap: docker
From: rockylinux:8

%files
	ucsf-chimerax-1.4-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

%post
	dnf -y update
	dnf -y install dnf-plugins-core strace
	# for pk-gtk-module and canberra-gtk-module:
	dnf -y install PackageKit-gtk3-module libcanberra-gtk3
	# install mesa drivers
	dnf -y install mesa-dri-drivers
	# install VMware graphics driver
	dnf -y install xorg-x11-drv-vmware
	# install Nvidia graphics driver
	#dnf -y install elrepo-release
	#dnf -y install nvidia-detect
	#dnf -y install $(nvidia-detect)
	# install ChimeraX
	dnf -y localinstall ucsf-chimerax-1.4-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

%runscript
	exec /usr/bin/chimerax "$@"